F5 Networks DevCentral Gains Cloud Agility and Scale with Enterprise-Grade Control in the Bluelock Cloud

F5 Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: FFIV), the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), today announced that it has migrated its global online community, DevCentralTM, to a cloud environment. DevCentral runs F5® cloud-enabled ADN solutions in multiple Bluelock Virtual Datacenters hosted in the public cloud, while adhering to IT best practices for scale, control, and security.

Until now, DevCentral was deployed in a one-size-fits-all enterprise IT environment that also supported financial applications and key business functions. To support the team’s business plans to grow and strengthen its global community, DevCentral needed to accelerate and optimize its DevOps initiatives.

“DevCentral has grown into a flourishing, global community of IT professionals who leverage F5 products to improve business agility. Rapid delivery of features and capabilities that make it easy for members to connect with peers, engage in discussion, and share best practices has always been a top priority,” said Jeff Browning, Sr. Director, Product Management at F5 Networks. “With our move to Bluelock’s public cloud environment, we’ve increased DevOps agility, achieving faster, more frequent application updates that optimize development cycles. This results in accelerated delivery of new features to satisfy our community, with the scale afforded by a more dynamic cloud environment—gracefully supporting our growth plan for years to come.”

DevCentral’s deployment of virtual cloud appliances mirrors traditional data center design, including best practices for routing and replication. Collaboration with Bluelock, where advanced cloud design comes together with proven F5 ADN capabilities, provides DevCentral with the following benefits:

Simplified lifecycle migration from development, to test, to production, resulting in more frequent, lower risk upgrades

Reduced complexity without relying on traditional replication schemes required for disaster recovery and high availability

Cost-effective operational consistency among all deployments to provide predictable configuration and testing

Clear visibility across infrastructure, platforms, and applications to provide edge-to-core troubleshooting, performance analysis, and more

Closer workgroup collaboration enabling DevOps through a common set of virtual data center tools and services shared between operations and development teams

“Bluelock and F5 Networks have a long history together, helping our mutual customers achieve agility and scalability in the cloud, and we can now take that to the developer community,” said Pat O’Day, Chief Technology Officer at Bluelock. “We’re pleased to see our partnership and Bluelock’s leading Virtual Datacenter solution directly helping the DevCentral team innovate and collaborate more easily while remaining secure—all in the spirit of building an even better community.”

“F5's DevCentral has been the gold standard for vendor-driven communities to date,” said Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. “DevCentral allows IT departments to leverage the power of the community to help accelerate and customize data center operations and application support. By migrating DevCentral to a Bluelock cloud environment, F5 has further increased the value of DevCentral by ensuring customers are always working with the latest versions of F5's products and have access to all of F5’s capabilities. This will result in customers being able to leverage F5's technology faster, to a broader set of applications with minimal risk.”

Achieving Cloud Benefits with Assurance of Enterprise Best Practices

Many enterprises have reservations about migrating to the cloud due to security and performance concerns. Regardless of deployment location, websites face heightened risks in today’s multi-vector threat scenarios. Social communities, built on user engagement and interaction, expose even greater threat vectors. The lack of acceleration and optimization services in the cloud can inhibit the deployment of solutions to improve application performance. To address these security and performance risks, DevCentral has employed a multi-faceted security strategy that utilizes F5’s BIG-IP® Local Traffic ManagerTM with data center firewall services, BIG-IP Application Security ManagerTM, and BIG-IP Access Policy ManagerTM along with the BIG-IP Global Traffic ManagerTM, BIG-IP WebAcceleratorTM, and BIG-IP WAN Optimization ManagerTM solutions. Together, these represent an industry first: a true cloud-enabled ADN that delivers the agile benefits of the cloud while leveraging established best practices from the enterprise.

Today, F5 also announced a cloud licensing program that enables enterprise-class ADN solutions in the cloud. Providing a unified architecture for both private and public clouds with virtual editions of its award-winning BIG-IP platform, F5 now offers its advanced ADN solutions in a utility billing model.

About F5

F5 Networks, Inc., the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN), helps the world’s largest enterprises and service providers realize the full value of virtualization, cloud computing, and on-demand IT. F5® solutions help integrate disparate technologies to provide greater control of the infrastructure, improve application delivery and data management, and give users seamless, secure, and accelerated access to applications from their corporate desktops and smart devices. An open architectural framework enables F5 customers to apply business policies at “strategic points of control” across the IT infrastructure and into the public cloud. F5 products give customers the agility they need to align IT with changing business conditions, deploy scalable solutions on demand, and manage mobile access to data and services. Enterprises, service and cloud providers, and leading online companies worldwide rely on F5 to optimize their IT investments and drive business forward. For more information, go to www.f5.com.

F5, Access Policy Manager, Application Security Manager, BIG-IP, DevCentral, Global Traffic Manager, Local Traffic Manager, WAN Optimization Manager, and WebAccelerator are trademarks or service marks of F5 Networks, Inc., in the U.S. and other countries. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

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